Although the multi-institutional
collaboration is increasingly the organizational framework for scientific research,
it has received only incidental attention from scholars. Without a dedicated
effort to understand the process of collaborative research, the records necessary
for efficient administration, for historical and management studies, and for
posterity, will be largely scattered or destroyed. The Center for History of
Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) has worked to redress this
situation with a multi-stage investigation. The aim of the long-term study was
to identify patterns of collaboration, define the scope of the documentation
problems, field-test possible solutions, and recommend future actions. The first
phase of the study addressed collaborations in high-energy physics; the second
phase addressed space science and geophysics (including oceanography). In this,
the third and last phase of the study, we studied briefly five disciplinary
fields: ground-based astronomy (divided into observatory builders and observatory
users), materials science, heavy-ion and nuclear physics, and medical physics,
plus one area we named computer-mediated collaborations.

In general, we continued to find
that most scientists, like other groups, only keep documents when they think
they are useful to them. Good records-keeping may be acknowledged by all as
necessary while the experimental process is alive, but when the experiment is
over, records can easily be neglected, forgotten, or destroyed. We also have
accumulated evidence that a major obstacle in documenting multi-institutional
collaborations is the lack of archival programs at some critical institutions.
Most administrators fail to consider the documentation of collaborations, no
matter how significant, as their responsibility.

In our archival analysis, we coupled
the organizational patterns of multi-institutional collaborations to the patterns
of records creation, retention and destruction, and likely locations of records.
Our reports include appraisal guidelines--to assist archivists and others with
responsibilities for selecting records for long-term preservation--and the identification
of a small set of "core" records that should be permanently preserved for all
collaborations in a given disciplinary field, as well as the more extensive
array of documentation that scientist-administrators, historians, and others
will need in order to understand collaborations of outstanding significance.
We also developed a set of recommendations directed to both scientific and archival
institutions to promote preservation of valuable documentation. These products
were based on a number of sources.

We found that in ground-based
astronomy, collaborations that build observatories have similar
structures with a Board of Directors overseeing an individual in charge of dealing
with observatory construction and committees of scientists providing advice
and building scientific instruments. Within this structure, these collaborations
varied in how much they relied on external contracts and professional managers.
As a class, observatory-building collaborations involve unique documentation
difficulties that arise from the circumstances of their financial support. Academic
observatories are built with funds primarily from a variety of non-Federal sources
with less stringent records requirements. The national observatories, supported
by the NSF as contract laboratories, do not create Federal records and are not
required by law to maintain records management programs or secure records of
archival value. Our project recommendations include actions to address these
obstacles to documenting the building of observatories.

By contrast, ground-based astronomy
collaborations that used multiple radio observatories for interferometry
were of two types. One was the minimally formalized collection of astronomers
who shared an understanding of what was needed to take data successfully and
who sought to expand the wavelengths at which interferometry was possible. The
other was the formal consortium of observatories that helped smaller groups
of astronomers to coordinate the use of several telescopes for observations
at wavelengths that were comfortably within the state-of-the-art. The difficulties
of documenting these collaborations are even more complex. They leave a scanty
paper trail (except for observational data) because they require little or no
dedicated funding and only minimal organizational structure; furthermore, they
neither design nor build the instrumentation they use. Finally, our principal
hope for documenting observatory-using collaborations must rely on changing
the documentary habits of individual scientists.

Materials science collaborations
were divided between those that built beamlines to use accelerators at Department
of Energy National Laboratories and those that coordinated the research performed
in the laboratories of member institutions. The organization of the accelerator
users varied widely depending on how many uses and users the collaboration wanted
the beamline to serve. However, they consistently created ample documentation
because of the records requirements of these laboratories and the records management
programs of DOE. The organization of the collaborations that coordinated the
laboratories of its members was more homogeneous, with a committee of leading
researchers from each institution invariably being the most important decision-making
body within the collaboration. Preservation of their valuable records will depend
largely on the ability of academic archives to include these new organizations
among their responsibilities, because the terms on which they were funded, especially
those funded as NSF centers (the Science and Technology Centers and the Materials
Research Science and Engineering Centers), enabled these collaborations to solicit
and fund proposals from scientists at their member institutions.

Nuclear and heavy-ion physics
recapitulated the organizational forms with which we became familiar in our
earlier study of high-energy physics. These collaborations built multi-component
detectors to take data at accelerator laboratories. The collaboration's scientific
leader served as the "spokesperson" and presided over highly participatory discussions
of the collaboration's strategy and tactics. An engineer or a technically minded
scientist tracked construction of the detector's components at the several member
institutions and oversaw their integration at the accelerator laboratory. These
collaborations should be adequately documented under the auspices of the records
programs at DOE and other major accelerator laboratories.

The three collaborations we studied
in medical physics varied widely in their organizations. One was rigidly
organized to insure that the participants adhered to a detailed research protocol;
one was loosely organized to enable participants to explore and compare various
possibilities for developing a new diagnostic procedure, and one was moderately
organized to balance the need to integrate different forms of expertise with
the need to grant autonomy to different experts. We were unable to reach generalizations
about which organizational form was typical or to determine whether we had encountered
the full range of medical physics collaborations. In addition, the AIP Center's
experience in documenting the contributions of individual practitioners and
its knowledge of the field's research centers and the key funding agency--the
National Institutes of Health--was much more limited in comparison to the other
fields. At best, our appraisal guidelines and project recommendations are suggestive./P>

We examined computer-mediated collaborations
to explore how computation capabilities and the computation problems in physical
research are being addressed. We found programs that support collaborations
of computer scientists and physical scientists who were using computation problems
in physical research to generate computer techniques with broad applicability.
These new kinds of projects should continue and thrive over the near future.
Like medical physics collaborations, these were diversely organized, but the
diversity resulted from different responses to the same problem: how best to
identify, foster, and satisfy the shared interests between computer and natural
scientists. In all but one case, the focus on computer science and computer
techniques did not create new documentation challenges. The exception was the
testbed for a national collaboratory, which generated a plethora of records
by creating electronic venues for scientific discussion and debate. Because
the purpose of this area of the study was to provide the AIP with a glimpse
of the likely structures of future multi-institutional collaborations, it did
not lead to records appraisal guidelines or project recommendations.

Our reports include detailed recommendations
to promote preservation of valuable documentation for future use by science
administrators, policy-makers, and historians and other scholars. The single
most important recommendation urges Federal science agencies to employ professional
archivists or records advocates (i.e., someone who can argue on behalf of the
historical value of records) as part of their records management staff. It has
been seen how effective such professionals have been at scientific settings,
such as some of the laboratories of the Department of Energy. This addition
would help the National Archives understand the unique records creation process
at each of the science agencies while increasing the effectiveness of the agencies'
records management programs.

The Phase III Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations was guided by a working group of distinguished scientists, science
administrators, archivists, historians, and sociologists. It was supported by
the AIP, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Historical Publications
and Records Commission, and the National Science Foundation.

Since World War II, the organizational
framework for scientific research is increasingly the multi-institutional collaboration.
However, this form of research has received slight attention from historians,
sociologists, and other scholars. Without a dedicated effort to understand such
collaborations, policy makers and administrators will continue to have only
hearsay and their personal memories to guide their management; even the records
necessary for efficient administration, for historical and management studies,
and for posterity, will be largely scattered or destroyed.

The Center for History of Physics
of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), in keeping with its mission to preserve
and make known the record of modern physics and allied sciences, is working
to redress this situation with a multi-stage investigation into areas of physics
and allied sciences where large collaborations are prominent. In order to locate
and preserve historical documentation, we must first get some idea of the process
of collaborative research and how the records are generated and used. Hence,
we made a broad preliminary survey, the first of its kind, into the functioning
of recent research collaborations that include three or more institutions. Our
study was designed to identify patterns of collaborations since the mid 1970s
and define the scope of the documentation problems. Along the way, we built
an archives of oral history interviews and other resources for scholarly use.
We use our findings to recommend future actions and promote systems to document
significant collaborative research.

The goal of the study is to make
it possible for scholars and others to understand these transient "institutions."
As collaborative research becomes ever more pervasive in our world, archivists
and records officers cannot avoid addressing documentary issues they raise.
These reports are designed to help responsible parties develop appropriate goals
and set priorities to save the records of greatest historical value.

The long-term study began in 1989.
Phase I, which focused on high-energy physics, was completed in 1992. Phase
II, which addressed collaborative research in space science and geophysics,
was completed in 1995. This report completes Phase III's study of five new disciplinary
areas (ground-based astronomy observatory builders, ground-based astronomy observatory
users, materials science, heavy-ion physics, and medical physics), and a category
we named computer-mediated collaborations.

Whereas earlier phases of the AIP
Center's long-term study had focused on one or two disciplinary areas, in our
third and last phase, we examined more briefly five areas in which multi-institutional
collaborations were well-established (or, in one area, just emerging) as vehicles
for research. In choosing this approach, we were aiming to round out the coverage
of physics and allied fields, to investigate the feasibility of reaching reliable
conclusions with less intensive collection of data, and to look toward the future:
What directions would multi-institutional collaborations take? What new documentation
problems might they present a decade from now? This last objective resulted
in two decisions: (1) to include more recent projects among our case studies,
e.g., projects that were not yet completed and (2) to include a category we
named computer-mediated collaborations, a category of collaborations that made
use of brand-new and dynamic computer techniques that were becoming widespread.

Phase III of the AIP Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations has been guided by a Working Group of distinguished scientists,
science administrators, and archivists (see Working
Group list) who joined in reviewing its findings and recommendations. In
addition, sociologists Wesley Shrum and Ivan Chompalov assisted us in designing
the project's methodology and research instruments. The project was directed
by Joan Warnow-Blewett with the assistance of Spencer R. Weart. Joel Genuth
served as project historian, and Anthony Capitos as project archivist (until
1997).

B. The Phase III Study of Collaborations

For our third, and last, phase of
work 23 projects were chosen to serve as case studies: seven for ground-based
astronomy, eight for materials science, two for heavy-ion and nuclear physics,
three for medical physics, and three for computer-mediated collaborations. For
a list of the case studies selected, see Report No. 2, Section One: "Selected
Case Studies." Considerable time and research on the part of project staff and
consulting sociologists was devoted to the design and construction of a question
set that would make sense to interview subjects and, at the same time, meet
project needs for historical, sociological, and archival data. The AIP staff
selected collaboration scientists who could serve as reliable informants, and
conducted a total of 78 interviews.

During previous phases of the AIP
Study, scores of site visits were made to university archives, government laboratories,
FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development Centers), and corporate laboratories.
During this third phase, site visits made by project staff focused on Federal
science funding agencies and the National Archives, where we discussed archival
issues and records policies.

The analyses of project interviews
by the project historian and consulting sociologists provided discrete images
of the institutional structures and functions that had the greatest impact on
the project formation, organization and management, data analysis, and dissemination
of projects. These findings, combined with the project's archival analysis,
site visits, and our previous knowledge of archival institutions, provide the
most reliable available guide to identifying areas of documentation problems
and potential solutions.

Support for this phase of the project
was provided by the American Institute of Physics, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National
Archives and Records Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

As in the previous phases of the
AIP Study, a major empirical basis for project recommendations is the historical
qualitative analysis of interviews with participants in multi-institutional
collaborations. An understanding of the social processes that require collaborations
to generate and use records is essential to conceptualizing what is worth saving
and what is feasible to save. Secondarily, such an understanding is the basis
for observations about where the organizational framework for multi-institutional
collaborations may affect the social relations and careers that are necessary
for scientific research.

For Phase III, we studied 23 collaborations
in five areas of physics and allied sciences: ground-based astronomy observatory
builders, ground-based astronomy observatory users, materials science, heavy-ion
and nuclear physics, and medical physics. In addition, we included computer-mediated
collaborations, which are highly important for the near future. This breadth
of coverage required us to conduct fewer interviews per collaboration than in
the previous phases. To facilitate quantitative-sociological analysis, we asked
more closed-ended questions than in the previous phases. Though less numerous
and intensive, these interviews proved more than adequate for generating pictures
of how collaborations have functioned in these research specialties.

Each scientific specialty is discussed
in turn. For each specialty, we strive to characterize those aspects of multi-institutional
collaborations that are most important for archival policies and practices.

A. Ground-Based Astronomy: Observatory
Builders

We conducted interviews on four
collaborations that built astronomical observatories. Our focus was the design
and construction of the observatories, not their use. Design and construction
were subject to collaboration management, but their use, in general, was determined
by the individual institutions. Our selection of collaborations did not include
any involving national observatories or the Association of Universities for
Research in Astronomy, which manages the national observatories.

These university-dominated collaborations
were motivated by astronomers' frustrations with the quality of their universities'
facilities and with the difficulty of obtaining observing time at national observatories.
To obtain enough capital needed to make a university-based observatory that
could match or outperform national observatories in some research area, university
astronomers needed to combine their intra-university funds and jointly raise
additional funds. Federal funding was, at most, an important supplement to other
sources. Finding partners was an awkward exercise for would-be instigators,
because astronomy departments that could raise funds usually had their own plans
for capital improvements. Personal connections between astronomers were usually
necessary for their department to learn of their common interests. Once instigators
had two of three institutions lined up to be major investors in an observatory,
other, often foreign institutions were welcome to provide smaller parts of the
remaining funds.

These collaborations were formalized
through signed, legal agreements among the institutional members. The basic
principle behind all the agreements was that collaboration members received
observing time in proportion to their contributions. The agreements specified
a governing structure that in all cases vested intra-collaboration authority
in a Board of Directors comprised of representatives from the member institutions.
However, one individual was most responsible for the physical construction of
each observatory (though the individual's title varied from collaboration to
collaboration). Usually, these collaborations organized advisory committees
of scientists from the member institutions to deliberate on science-engineering
trade-offs, to set specifications for scientific instruments to be used with
the observatory, and to plan commissioning measurements. Also, these collaborations
usually organized external panels to perform design reviews of major observatory
components.

Within this common structure these
collaborations varied mostly by the degree to which they professionalized the
development and construction of their observatories. The professionally managed
collaborations empowered a project manager to let and oversee contracts for
the development, construction, and integration of the major observatory components.
The moderately professionalized selected a scientist from one of the member
institutions to oversee contracts that the members' universities awarded for
the major observatory components. The self-managed did much of the work in-house,
using the labor of graduate students and postdocs to conserve cash. These varying
arrangements reflect the ambivalence of astronomers about the trade-off between
achieving efficiency by centralizing project management and maintaining their
individual institutions' prerogatives and traditions.

The major power retained by the
member institutions was to determine how the observatory would be used. Usually
each institution has its own "Time Allocation Committee" to consider proposals
from its own scientists, though the self-managed collaboration centralized consideration
of observing proposals. Additionally, most of these collaborations commissioned
member institutions to design and build scientific instruments to be used at
the observatory. Once the collaboration set broad specifications for the instruments,
the instrument builders were able to proceed in near total autonomy.

Because use of all of these observatories
has been determined by judgement of proposals, none of the collaborations managed
the topics addressed through the use of its facilities. In most cases, the collaborations
have left data processing and analysis almost entirely in the hands of individual
observers. Observatory operations--e.g., making possible remote operation of
the observatory from member institutions--have been the primary computational
problem addressed in the context of the collaboration.

None of these collaborations ever
lost institutional members, which is hardly surprising given the institutions's
investment of their own funds. Each has or apparently will succeed in building
and operating its observatory, but only a professionally managed collaboration
finished on time and budget. All have been or will be used for a wide variety
of studies. Author lists for publications based on use of these observatories
include only individuals involved in performing the observations, not individuals
who developed the observatory and its scientific instruments.

B. Ground-Based Astronomy: Users
of Observatories

We conducted interviews on three
collaborations that used existing observatories. Our focus was mostly on data
collection, analysis, and dissemination, because these collaborations relied
on the observatories or other scientific programs to generate the instrumentation
they needed. None of the collaborations we studied performed sky surveys or
interferometry with optical telescopes.

These collaborations were mostly
comprised of university-based radio-astronomy observatories, whose affiliated
scientists wished to perform very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). Circa
1970, informal collaborations succeeded in obtaining interference fringes by
"correlating" their independently recorded data tapes. Success spawned imitation
and competition. By the mid-1970s, competitive astronomers did not want to continue
relying on one another for the operations of each other's observatories, and
observatory directors wanted formal rules to govern the coordinated use of their
observatories. Astronomers resorted to forming two types of collaborations,
which dominate our sample. One involved formal arrangements among the radio
observatories for scheduling and supporting VLBI at conventional wavelengths;
the other was the continued use of informal collaborations to attempt to expand
the wavelength regime in which interferometry was possible. The former required
a formal agreement and designated itself a consortium; the latter just required
that the interested astronomers propose the observation to their respective
observatories. Our sample did not include collaborations that performed sky
surveys, optical interferometry, or VLBI observations at conventional wavelengths.

Neither type of collaboration had
much organizational structure. Issues of fiscal accountability did not inspire
these collaborations to develop an organizational structure, because their costs
were covered within the budgets of the observatories. Furthermore, the consortium
of observatories required little organization because it did not have to manage
the work it made possible. Once its chairman had negotiated with observatory
directors for observing time and resources for VLBI observations, and once its
secretary had collected reviews of proposals for VLBI observations and scheduled
the best proposals, the consortium's work was done and individual observers
took over. An annual meeting, in conjunction with the American Astronomical
Society meeting, sufficed for the community of VLBI researchers to elect officers
and make known their views on opportunities for and obstacles to VLBI observations.
As for the informal collaborations, their members's mutual understanding of
what VLBI observations required obviated the need for organizational structure.
The scientist acknowledged as having the deepest personal investment in an observation
moderated the collaboration-wide discussions needed to produce an observing
plan, dealt with the observatory directors, and saw to obtaining any additional
equipment the collaboration needed. No further organization of tasks was required;
individual participants who best knew a particular observatory took responsibility
for the technically tricky task of configuring the observatory for VLBI observations.

Internationalism, though common
in VLBI to increase the lengths of the baselines, also did not lead to any elaborate
organization. Because there were no funds to account for or technical developments
to coordinate, international collaboration was only marginally more onerous
than trans-continental collaboration within the United States.

Neither type of collaboration designed
or built the instrumentation it used. The radio observatories themselves research
and develop electronics for radio-wave detection and amplification. Support
for the development of instrumentation peculiar to VLBI comes from NASA to support
geodetic measurements of continental drift.

The formal consortium played no
role in data analysis, interpretation, and the dissemination of scientific findings.
These were entirely the responsibility of the individual observers who gained
access to the observatories under the consortium's auspices. The informal collaborations
had to correlate the individual data sets from the participating observatories
in order to have a hope for scientific success. (Correlation generates the interference
patterns that would have been produced had the observatories been hard-wired
together to form a physical interferometer.) Correlation has been thus the central
drama of VLBI observations, as participants struggled to find a synchronized
playback that would yield interference fringes and justify the time and effort
spent in acquiring the data. Once correlated, a data set still required considerable
processing before it could be the basis for a scientific interpretation. Only
the participants most interested in the objects being observed worked on processing
correlated data and drafting manuscripts for publication in scientific journals.
Participants who were more concerned with data acquisition and correlation than
with the objects being observed reviewed manuscripts before their submission,
and had the right to have their names removed from the author list. All participating
scientists and engineers from observatories whose data successfully correlated
with others' were entitled to be authors.

These two types of collaborations
reflect a commitment to maintaining the ability of individual astronomers to
claim credit for observations of astronomical objects. Ongoing, informal collaboration
was the province only of the technically ambitious few, who were more intent
in their collaborative research on expanding the wavelength regime in which
VLBI could be used than in observing particular objects. Once significant numbers
of astronomers became convinced of the feasibility and fertility of performing
VLBI at a particular wavelength, the purpose of collaboration shifted to formalizing
relations among the observatories in the interest of freeing individual astronomers
from the need to cooperate with competitors. When the consortium organized centimeter
wavelength VLBI, the technically ambitious began exploring prospects for millimeter
VLBI. It remains to be seen whether the process will repeat itself.

C. Materials Science

We conducted interviews on eight
collaborations in materials science. The scope of their collaborative activities
varied considerably even within the two broad categories of collaborations that
worked at accelerator laboratories and collaborations that coordinated the research
of laboratories within their member institutions.

These collaborations formed for
one of two purposes: to focus materials scientists at several institutions on
investigating a particular set of materials or to build a beamline for materials
science research at a national accelerator laboratory. They were all multi-sectoral
with universities and corporation being major participants in most. In some,
competing corporations jointly participated. Internationalism was rare, and
in cases related to national defense or economic interests, it was banned outright.
Government agencies were frequently a direct source of funds, but the legal
arrangements they made with the collaborations varied; corporations shared costs
when they participated.

All the collaborations that did
not use accelerators owed their existence partly to changes in the organization
or authority of funding agencies. This is not to say that the government has
foisted collaborations on an unwilling community, but rather that the significance
of studying particular materials and the prospects for acquiring significant
government funds were together so alluring that the participating institutions
bent their customary operations to accommodate each other.

Accelerator-using collaborations
in materials science mostly formed in response to the opportunity to develop
customized, novel beams and complementary detectors for examining classes of
materials. They varied widely in their scientific breadth from studying a couple
of related materials to supporting as many disciplines as their instigators
found feasible.

Geographic proximity was a significant
factor in the formation of the non-accelerator collaborations, but they rarely
ended up regional in scope. They either expanded geographically in order to
include expertise that was essential to win funding, or important individual
members changed employers and brought their new institution into the collaboration.
Geographic proximity was far less important to the formation of accelerator-using
collaborations--except insofar as having a participating institution close to
the accelerator laboratory was obviously convenient.

As with most other collaborations,
drafting a proposal was the central challenge to the formation of all materials
science collaborations. Defining a "complete" or "excellent" proposal was more
ambiguous for the non-accelerator collaborations because few of their specific
tasks had to be done within a collaborative framework. To defuse the
criticism that they were administrative fictions created to obtain funding that
their members could not have individually obtained in national competition,
some proposal authors claimed their collaborations to be "device-oriented"--meaning
they needed a collaboration to cover all the facets of using novel materials
for a technological purpose. Others claimed their collaborations would overcome
the organizational obstacles that made it hard to mobilize the quantity and
quality of resources that research into the novel materials merited. Device-oriented
collaborations included corporate competitors, and formalizing these collaborations
required the instigators to write an intellectual property agreement that their
institutions found acceptable. In all the cases we studied, these negotiations
were onerous.

Ultimate authority for the non-accelerator
collaborations was usually vested in an inter-institutional Board of Directors
that typically included the research administrators overseeing each institution's
participation in the collaboration and other representatives from the participating
institutions. Once this board set the broadest fiscal and personnel policies
within which the collaboration was to operate, it had no role unless called
on to decide internal disagreements.

Substantive policies, like the collaboration's
division of labor and allocation of resources, were set by a committee below
the Board of Directors. This committee, whose name varied from collaboration
to collaboration, usually included the overseeing research administrators and
scientists representing research areas. Daily management of affairs, especially
relations with the funding agency, were the responsibility of a collaboration
director, who was usually also the overseeing research administrator for the
institution that was fiscally responsible for the collaboration's funding.

By contrast, the accelerator-using
collaborations usually did not create much of an authority structure. They did
not need a Board of Directors, because their participants' mutual understanding
of what constituted a workable system for generating data insured they could
reach timely decisions on design and construction of a beamline. They did not
need a policy-making committee because they designed their instrumentation so
that each team could use it independently. Routine daily affairs were handled
by a participating scientist at or near the accelerator laboratory, and a collaboration
spokesperson dealt with the accelerator laboratory's administration.

Determining (and in some cases redetermining)
an internal structure and allocating resources across the divisions it created
were the central collective tasks for the non-accelerator collaborations. The
collaborations that proposed to overcome organizational obstacles treated their
internal organization as malleable objects of experimentation, and the balance
between the research areas and the participating institutions on the policy-making
committee was critical to dealing with the potential conflicts of reorganization.
Annual or semi-annual collaboration-wide workshops were the primary formal occasions
for assessing the wisdom and efficacy of the collaboration's organization in
light of the latest results. Meetings of external advisory committees also stimulated
ferment.

The device-oriented collaborations
did not pursue internal reorganizations. They divided labor along institutional
lines to make it easy for their corporate scientists to participate without
releasing information their corporations wished to keep proprietary. Although
funding-agency reviews did force participants to look critically at their arrangements,
the difficulties in negotiating the initial intellectual property agreement
inhibited any efforts to reform the collaboration's internal structure, even
when participants were dissatisfied with the quality of intra-collaboration
technical discussions. The central collaborative task of the accelerator-using
collaborations was to design, build, and operate the beamline (including detectors)
that would serve the needs of the members. When corporations were involved,
the collaborations had to make arrangements for the corporations to perform
proprietary research. They did so in varying ways, but in no case were the arrangements
nearly so difficult to design and maintain as the intellectual property agreements
that were negotiated in non-accelerator collaborations. One accelerator-using
collaboration we studied pursued integrated studies of specified materials using
extant beamlines and detection instrumentation. It needed no significant management.
The number of participants was small enough, their roles so self-evidently clear,
and the needed facilities so easily tapped that nobody even had to organize
a meeting of all the participants.

"Teams" in the non-accelerator materials
science collaborations referred to a multi-institutional group of researchers
concentrating on a substantive problem. All data in these collaborations were
taken as part of team activities with corporations sharing the data they took
under the requirements and protections provided by the collaboration's intellectual
property agreement. None of these collaborations collectively built instrumentation
with which to take data streams for the use of everyone in the collaboration.
None of the teams and individual scientists in these collaborations have had
to build up their instrumentation from scratch, because their researches within
the collaboration have involved using the techniques they employed in their
pre-collaboration researches. Though development of instrumentation was not
a principal activity of the non-accelerator collaborations, they did support
the acquisition of new instrumentation by member institutions. The new instrumentation
was invariably purchased--sometimes by contract in which the purchasing institution
specified novel features for the maker to incorporate. The teams operated at
diverse levels of autonomy in these collaborations. The device-oriented tended
towards the extremes; the teams operated either with high autonomy to make protection
of proprietary information easy or with high coordination to make integration
of novel materials into a new device easy. The teams in collaborations oriented
towards overcoming organizational obstacles operated with more intermediate
autonomy. The participants were all building on their individual prior research,
which as a rule they had pursued autonomously, but the participants also knew
that collaboration administrators and funding-agency officials would judge the
collaboration on whether participants together performed research that would
not have been done had the collaboration not existed.

The meaning of "teams" in accelerator-using
collaborations was idiosyncratic for almost each collaboration. It could mean:
a sub-set of institutional members responsible for a particular set of instrumentation;
the member institutions and how each determined how it used its time to operate
the collective instrumentation; the member institutions and how they used the
expertise in which each was strongest; groups of similarly specialized scientists
from all member institutions interested in pursuing a particular form of experimentation;
or nothing at all. This condition probably reflects the novelty of this form
of research for materials scientists; norms and precedents are sufficiently
few that each collaboration invents its sub-structure from scratch.

None of the non-accelerator materials
science collaborations have needed collaboration-wide policies on the acquisition
and processing of raw data, because none of them took data on a collaboration-wide
basis. Data sharing was often encouraged, though the interdependent researchers
were left to their own devices for making arrangements to share data and to
analyze them jointly. Data sharing was only banned when a corporation in an
accelerator-using collaboration took proprietary data. In device-oriented collaborations,
the intellectual property agreements regulated data sharing. In general, these
agreements obliged participants to share data about the characteristics of the
materials and the performance of the components they were experimenting with,
but not to share data about the processes by which they were making the materials
and components. Data archiving and long-term ownership of data are subjects
with which materials scientists are just beginning to grapple.

Almost none of these collaborations
maintained ongoing collaboration-wide policies for determining the substance
and quality of research results. Teams or individual data-takers largely decided
when and where to disseminate what. In device-oriented collaborations, manuscripts
were internally reviewed for compliance with the collaboration's intellectual
property agreement; nobody ever reported experiencing a problem with the reviews.
Accelerator-using collaborations rarely published scientific results with a
collaboration-wide author list (except for papers reporting on beamline design
and performance).

The non-accelerator materials science
collaborations we studied have been granted funding commitments for as short
as two years and potentially as long as 11 (subject to renewals). The accelerator-using
collaborations were open-ended in time; they existed (or will exist) for as
long as their participants successfully pursued funding. Once formed, all materials-science
collaborations have had stable institutional memberships with few institutions
dropping out or joining. (The individual investigators in the collaboration
have changed significantly over the life of the collaboration). However, the
accelerator-using and non-accelerator collaborations have differed in their
likelihood to reorganize. The former have been far more likely to stick with
their original organizations than the latter. When the non-accelerator collaborations
did not reorganize themselves, they were short; and when they reorganized, they
were long.

Success for the accelerator-using
collaborations meant creating conditions that enabled its members to take data
and publish papers. Participants were presumed to know what their scientific
interests were and to be capable of independently satisfying them once the collaboration
provided the necessary instrumentation. The premise among the non-accelerator
collaborations, by contrast, was that their participants could not independently
satisfy their scientific interests and perhaps were constrained by their institutional
arrangements from even realizing what their best interests were. Success for
the device-oriented was development of a prototype device--or at least the knowledge
needed for designing and building a prototype device; success has led to dissolution
as members have preferred not to reinvent the collaboration and recast the intellectual
property agreement to take into account the shifts in interests among their
members. Success for the collaborations that proposed to eliminate organizational
obstacles was the creation of an internal structure that its members would continue
to want to work within; they endure in order to demonstrate that their findings
and their organization together generate compelling lines of research.

As a group, these collaborations
have been most significant as attempts to find satisfying working relationships
among institutions from different sectors. The accelerator-using collaborations
functioned smoothly because they left the participating institutions with the
latitude to decide what to examine and who to involve in its examination. The
non-accelerator collaborations attempted a more organic integration of university,
industrial, and government science, and elicited more conflicts. No single publication
from any of these collaborations was said to have significantly affected scientific
or technological practice. Nevertheless, interviewees have all expressed satisfaction
with the intellectual quality of their participation. All are credited with
wisely bringing together experts with different perspectives but common interests
in a class of materials.

D. Heavy-Ion and Nuclear Physics

We interviewed participants in two
collaborations in heavy-ion and nuclear physics. We expected our earlier study
of high-energy physics to be applicable to this field, and the Working Group
confirmed our expectation. These collaborations fit readily into a pattern we
found in our earlier in-depth study of high-energy physics. They were comprised
predominately of American universities and national laboratories with foreign
institutions being integral to meet the collaborations' needs for manpower and
expertise in particular forms of instrumentation. They formed when the construction
of a new accelerator inspired professional friends and their circles of colleagues
to draft a proposal, and they considered themselves formal entities once the
proposal was accepted. They focused a beam of particles on a metal target to
generate interactions that were detected by elaborate combinations of instruments
arrayed behind the target. And they had dedicated, centralized funds for instrumentation;
the participating institutions covered personnel and travel costs. The organization
of these collaborations also followed a high-energy physics model. They designated
a "spokesperson," who was the scientific leader, to represent the collaboration
to the accelerator laboratory and to lead intra-collaboration discussions. They
divided labor for building detector components along institutional lines and
designated an individual to track the development of the components and deal
with systems engineering problems. They held collaboration-wide meetings three
to four times a year to discuss research strategy and to review results. They
assumed that discussions would result in consensus with the spokesperson making
decisions only as a last resort.

"Team" in these collaborations usually
referred to the institutional member(s) responsible for a particular component.
Each team had to design its component to fit the geometry of the overall detector
and to perform at a level that fit the capabilities of the other components.
Most components were built in the laboratories and shops of the participating
institutions. Each team had to provide the software for reading out and processing
the raw data from its component, and the software had to conform to collaboration-wide
standards so that data analyses could be readily performed on multiple data
streams. All data streams from every detector component were deemed the collaboration's
collective property. In various ways, they all struggled with the trade-off
between maximizing individuals' freedom in methods of analysis and topics of
analysis while insuring that results could be compared and that graduate students
had well differentiated dissertation topics.

Publication was a collective effort.
Drafts of papers were circulated among all participating scientists, and manuscripts
were not sent to a journal for consideration until all had indicated their approval.

Like high-energy physics collaborations
performing "strings" of experiments, these collaborations had a central core
of personnel and institutions plus groups that joined and left depending on
the collaborations' needs and the other groups' interests. Success for these
collaborations meant producing scientific publications. Nobel Prize caliber
discoveries were hoped for, but participants were satisfied with numerous publications
and good opportunities for graduate students.

E. Medical Physics

We interviewed participants in three
medical physics collaborations. These collaborations formed either to develop
new medical procedures or to test state-of-the-art procedures. Radiologists
at medical schools and their affiliated hospitals participated in all the collaborations
we studied. Collaborations developing procedures included physical scientists,
who often worked for university science departments, corporate laboratories,
or national laboratories. Collaborations that tested procedures included statisticians
from public health departments and medical professional societies. Internationalism
was rare, probably because of the importance of national standards for medical
practice.

The instigation of these collaborations
varied widely. At one extreme, when physicists and physicians hatched ideas
for using physics instrumentation for diagnostic purposes, word-of-mouth and
geographic proximity were essential for collaborators to find each other and
build the intellectual intimacy needed for the various specialists to understand
each other. At the other extreme, when policy-makers wanted a collaboration
to form that would address the paucity of information for assessing diagnostic
modalities, the funding agency selected the participants on the basis of their
individual proposals in the hopes that the collaboration would produce an impersonal
consensus on the effectiveness of various diagnostic tools. The collaborations
at the extremes and in intermediate positions had difficulties formalizing their
arrangements, indicating that the institutions that support medical physics
do not form multi-institutional collaborations often enough to have smooth procedures
for managing collaborations when they do form.

The organization of these three
collaborations ran the full range from rigidly organized in response to external
pressures, to self-organized in response to perceived needs, to barely organized
in response to perceived lack of need. Procedure-testing collaborations were
most rigidly organized to insure the collection of comparable data streams for
statistical analysis. The procedure-developing collaborations required less
organizational formality because the obvious differences in the expertise of
their participants led to a well-understood division of labor and responsibilities.
When a procedure-developing collaboration did not need to coordinate data acquisition
around a central facility, its organizational structure consisted of nothing
more than a "project director" who did little beyond organizing collaboration-wide
meetings.

The very name "medical physics"
evokes cross-disciplinary exchanges and the corresponding possibility of conflict
based on different scientific orientations as well as different financial expectations,
cultural expectation, and institutional affiliations. However, the only collaboration-threatening
conflict among any of the cases we studied involved confusion over which members
were entitled to apply for funding from which funding program, given that there
was no single program for the collaboration to apply to as a whole.

Procedure-developing and procedure-testing
collaborations defined "teams" in different ways. In the former, teams were
comprised of functionally differentiated groups that each covered one of the
range of skills and specialties needed to create an effective diagnostic system.
Each team was responsible for the research and development of the instrumentation,
algorithms, or clinical evaluations required for its task. In the latter, teams
were comprised of functionally equivalent groups in order to standardize diagnostic
procedures over a statistically significant portion of the population. Each
collected data by performing the specified diagnostic procedures to the collaboration's
standards; tinkering with instrumentation or procedures was expressly forbidden.
Medical physics collaborations, unlike all others AIP has studied, had human
subjects and were obliged to archive data on patients and to keep those
data confidential. In procedure-testing collaborations, information was carefully
compartmentalized and teams kept ignorant of each other's findings in the interest
of eliminating the possibility of bias in ongoing data acquisition. Data-sharing
was desirable or necessary in procedure-developing collaborations, which also
faced computational challenges in processing data because of the technical novelties
of their instrumentation.

Publication of results from procedure-testing
collaborations had to await the completion of data acquisition and statistical
analysis; manuscripts were then subject to a collaboration-wide review with
all participants listed as authors. Dissemination policies varied across procedure-developing
collaborations, depending on the extent to which the teams were independently
able to produce publishable results.

The costs of medical physics collaborations
are difficult to assess because of their occasionally disjointed funding, cost-sharing
with corporate participants, and the participation of physicists without dedicated
funding. However, the costs of performing clinical trials to assess the efficacy
of diagnostic systems dwarfed the cost of developing the systems.

In the collaborations we studied,
those developing diagnostic systems have been more stable than the collaboration
assessing the efficacy of diagnostic techniques. As the latter has switched
its focus from organ to organ, it has made close to wholesale changes in institutional
participants. Internally, however, all of these collaborations have been organizationally
stable.

The small number of cases examined
plus AIP's lack of familiarity with the field make generalization difficult.
Also, new policies at NIH to attract experts in computation to bio-medical research
have the potential to alter the environment for multi-institutional collaborations
in medical physics. However, one clear theme was that all of these collaborations
struggled with the trade-off between standardizing practices in the interest
of testing practices clinically and tinkering with the components of diagnostic
systems in the interest of discovering obviously superior practices. Conflicts
were most significant in the collaboration that explicitly and only tested practices.
When the collaboration could not collect data and publish results before equipment
manufacturers produced their next generation of systems for acquiring data,
participants considered the results obsolete upon publication and questioned
each other's practices.

F. Computer-Mediated Collaborations

We decided to assume the responsibility
of investigating an area we named computer-mediated collaborations because collaborating
around the new capabilities made possible by advances in computation seems likely
to increase in the future. Most of the participants in the three collaborations
we studied were university faculty, but non-university participants were essential
to each of these collaborations. International participation was minimal. None
of these collaborations was funded from within the traditional programs of the
government funding agencies, and all included both computer scientists and physical
scientists. All had difficulty forming because of their unconventional funding
arrangements or composition.

The central managerial task of all
these collaborations was coping with the diversity of interests they included.
None entirely succeeded in finding a comfortable and appropriate organizational
structure. One avoided the problem by increasing the autonomy of participants
and decreasing the role of collaboration leader. Another eliminated the problem
by reducing the number of participants and interests in the collaboration and
increasing the number of collaboration managers to make sure that all the remaining
interests were well represented in collaboration governance. The third sharply
distinguished software writers from software users and accepted the toll on
collaboration morale from misunderstandings and poor communication among participants
who were not confident in each other. They all sometime precariously balanced
how strongly the collaboration should integrate its members' ongoing research,
how broadly the collaboration should reach across the possible topics it could
investigate, and how centered the collaboration should be within one of its
institutional members and participating disciplines. Their survival and success
demonstrate the importance of computational sophistication for progress in physical
science, and empirical challenges for progress in computer science.

The individual teams within these
collaborations usually published their research autonomously. None set an explicit
policy for whom to include in an author list. The utility of computation in
so many sciences poses obvious organizational conundrums. Scientists making
their careers as computer scientists tend to focus on topics of general significance
to their disciplinary colleagues and to downplay the importance of topics of
significance to other disciplines. Physicists who become sophisticated in computation
tend to use their computational skills to advance their fields and to downplay
the general significance of their computational work. These collaborations represent
an attempt to have it both ways: to create intellectual intimacy between computer
and natural scientists without losing the intellectual power that comes from
specializing within a disciplinary tradition. The fact that these collaborations
hung together despite the tensions they internalized suggests that "grass-roots"
support for multi-disciplinary collaborations between computer scientists and
physical scientists is developing.

The historical analysis summarized
above described the patterns of organization of multi-institutional collaborations
and the activities they employed to carry out those functions. The following
archival analysis is organized in the same way as the historical analysis, i.e.,
by the five disciplinary fields covered in our Phase III work followed by the
category we named computer-mediated collaborations.

The archival analysis couples the
organizational patterns of multi-institutional collaborations to the patterns
of records creation, retention and destruction, and likely locations of records.
In Report No. 2, we offer appraisal guidelines to assist archivists and others
with responsibilities for selecting records for long-term preservation. In particular,
we identify a small set of "core" records that should be permanently preserved
for all collaborations in a given disciplinary field, as well as the more extensive
array of documentation that scientist-administrators, historians, and others
will need to understand collaborations of outstanding significance. For multi-institutional
collaborations in all scientific disciplines, additional documentation should
be provided by saving professional papers of distinguished practitioners of
these disciplines. We also developed a set of recommendations to promote preservation
of valuable documentation (see Project Recommendations, Section Two of this
report).

Our report on archival analysis
and appraisal guidelines is based on a number of sources: (1) the archival assessment
of 78 interviews conducted on the 23 selected case studies; (2) the patterns
uncovered through the historical and, in part, the sociological analysis of
these interviews; (3) numerous site visits to Federal science agencies and to
the National Archives and Records Administration; (4) site visits to archival
repositories, especially during previous phases of the AIP Study; and (5) the
AIP Center's general knowledge of archival institutions in various settings.

Throughout the AIP's long-term study
we have found that--in all multi-institutional collaborations--some types of
records are created by necessity: proposals, designs of instruments, purchase
requisitions, logbooks of data acquisition, data analysis records, and progress
and final narrative and financial reports. In addition to these operational
records, collaborations usually create minutes and reports of committees and
sub-committees. Our interviews with individual scientists show that decisions
to create (as well as to retain) these records to a large extent reflect the
style and personal inclinations of individuals. This is especially the case
for their own correspondence, notebooks, and other files. Certain circumstances
affect the creation or retention of valuable documentation. These include the
degree of centralization of the collaboration, the role of engineers, and the
increasing impact of fax, electronic mail, and the World Wide Web.

We have accumulated evidence that
a major obstacle in documenting multi-institutional collaborations is the lack
of archival programs at some critical institutions. Even where archival programs
exist, administrators at most universities, at most FFRDCs (Federally Funded
Research and Development Centers), and those at virtually all research institutes,
corporate or government laboratories, fail to consider as their responsibility
the documentation of collaborations, no matter how significant.

A. Ground-Based Astronomy: Observatory
Builders

The difficulties of documenting
the work of telescope-building collaborations are distinctive among the disciplines
covered by the long-term AIP Study. The unique difficulties arise from the circumstances
of their financial support. Academic observatories are built with funds primarily
from a variety of non-Federal sources and, when these are private foundations
or universities, records requirements are less stringent. In the case of national
observatories, the National Science Foundation is virtually the sole supporter.
These observatories are operated in a fashion similar to the Department of Energy's
national laboratories, but--unlike the DOE--the NSF contract laboratories and
observatories do not create Federal records. Accordingly, these national observatories
are not required by law to maintain records management programs or secure records
of archival value. To address these obstacles, our recommendations urge universities
to take responsibility for documenting their academic observatories and, for
national observatories, we ask that the NSF take positive steps to secure relevant
records at its headquarters and to support archival programs at the national
observatories.

Despite these important differences,
we have found that the patterns of organization and management of all telescope-building
collaborations are quite similar. All four collaborations included in our case
studies vested authority in a Board of Directors, and made one individual most
responsible for the physical construction, usually with the title of project
manager. In most cases they organized Science Advisory/Science Steering Committees
of scientists from the member institutions to cope with the trade-offs between
scientific capabilities, and engineering and financial burdens. Individuals
in these offices create substantial documentation in carrying out their responsibilities.
The creation of records does not, of course, equate with saving those records.
It is fortunate that virtually all of the individuals holding these positions
in observatory-building collaborations are on university faculties where archival
repositories are well-established.

Because of the expense and uniqueness
of observatories and because few are built in any one decade, the AIP Study
has taken the position that each telescope-building collaboration should be
categorized as significant with substantial documentation permanently preserved
for future use by scientist/administrators and historians and other scholars.
In addition to NSF grant award jackets and NSF cooperative agreement jackets
for research facilities, the following records should be saved for all telescope-building
collaborations: documents of incorporation (sometimes called MOUs), Board of
Directors' minutes of meetings, records of project managers, records of Science
Advisory/Science Steering Committees, records of Design Review Panels, records
of Science Project Teams, contracts and associated records, and technical reports
(sometimes called memoranda series or technical memoranda).

B. Ground-Based Astronomy: Users
of Observatories

If it is difficult to document the
building of observatories, it seems virtually impossible to document collaborations
of observatory users--at least radio telescope users. The reason is straightforward.
They leave a scanty paper trail (except for observational data)--because they
require little or no dedicated funding and only minimal organizational structures--and
they neither design nor build the instrumentation they use.

The best core record of a given
collaboration is the lead scientist's proposal for use of a participating observatory's
telescope and his/her collaboration-wide correspondence. To secure that documentation,
we need radio observatories to have policies to preserve their proposal and
evaluation records. For a richer record, we are dependent upon lead scientists
to save their papers and their employing institutions to accession them for
their archives (once again, we are fortunate that lead scientists are on academic
faculties or staffs). For collaborations of high distinction, the records of
observatory consortium secretaries should also be preserved.

C. Materials Science

Our historical analysis of collaborations
in materials science makes distinctions between those that make use of accelerator
and reactor facilities at DOE National Laboratories and those that do not. Our
archival analysis is strikingly different for these two categories.

Collaborations that do not use national
laboratory facilities present documentation challenges whether managed by universities
or corporations. NSF centers (the Science and Technology Centers and the Materials
Research Science and Engineering Centers) have emerged in recent decades on
university campuses; most, if not all, of the centers are responsible for judging
proposals from researchers employed by member institutions. This practice diminishes
the detail of documentation at NSF Headquarters. All three of our case studies
of university-managed collaborations lacked a physical location beyond their
offices at the fiscally accountable university. In a field with strong participation
of corporate organizations, it is not surprising that our case studies included
an instance in which the collaboration was managed out of a corporate institutional
member which no longer exists because it was merged into another corporation;
such mergers endanger records.

The characteristics of those collaborations
that did make use of accelerators or reactors at DOE National Laboratories (half
of our case studies) are quite different. For one thing, they had some characteristics
similar to those we were familiar with from other studies involving DOE National
Laboratories: they were all required to submit both technical and managerial
plans to the Facility Advisory Committees (our generic term for a variety of
titles) of the laboratory facility, and they all had a liaison with the DOE
Laboratory facility (whether called spokesperson, staff director, or an untitled
member who played the role). These characteristics assure preservation on the
part of the DOE National Laboratories of some core records and help us locate
documentation for significant collaborations.

The core records for materials science
collaborations are proposals to Federal funding agencies and/or to corporate
management and/or to Executive (Program) Committees of NSF centers-- and--for
those using synchrotron radiation facilities--records of Facility Advisory Committees
at DOE National Laboratories. Additional records to be preserved for collaborations
of high significance are: records of the Executive Board (or Governing Board,
Program Committee, or Technical Representatives Committee), records of external
advisory committees, records of annual meetings of the collaboration, records
of spokespersons/staff directors, newsletters and sector descriptions, and collaboration
records on compact disk.

D. Heavy-Ion and Nuclear Physics

We are confident of our findings
in this category even though we have only two case studies. Our earlier in-depth
study of high-energy physics experiments at national accelerator laboratories
provided substantial understanding of experiments in the related fields of nuclear
and heavy-ion physics at these laboratories. We find the familiar roles of laboratory
PACs (Physics Advisory Committees) governing access to particle accelerator
beamtime, the MOUs (Memoranda of Understanding) detailing institutional commitments,
spokespersons providing liaison, and collaboration-wide meetings. We also find
management structures more familiar to us from collaborations in other disciplines--structures
that may indicate emerging complexities in the various areas of particle physics
collaborations that archivists should be on the lookout for. Finally, we are
in the world of Web sites with areas accessible only to those with proper passwords
and no guarantee of permanence.

In addition to proposals to Federal
funding agencies, the core records for heavy-ion and nuclear physics collaborations
are the records of Physics Advisory Committees at DOE National Laboratories
and other accelerator laboratories. Additional records to be preserved for the
most significant collaborations are records of spokespersons, collaboration
group leaders, project managers, and project engineers, in addition to Intra-Collaboration
Technical Committee records and collaboration Web site records.

E. Medical Physics

For several reasons, it is virtually
impossible for us to assess with any certainty the archival situation in the
area of medical physics. For one thing, the AIP Center has had little experience
in documenting the research activities of medical schools or other medical research
centers, in saving papers of individual practitioners, or in dealing with the
key funding agency--the National Institutes of Health (or its constituent parts
such as the National Cancer Institute). In addition, we had difficulties in
persuading individuals in the discipline to participate in our AIP Study. Consequently,
our appraisal guidelines (see Report No. 2) and our Project Recommendations
to funding agencies and research institutions in the field are--for the most
part--merely suggestive.

We classify the following as core
records for collaborations in the area of medical physics: proposal jackets
to private foundations and Federal funding agencies (including referee and panel
reports and annual and final progress reports) and--for those using DOE synchrotron
radiation facilities--records of DOE Facility Advisory Committees. Additional
records to be preserved for highly significant collaborations are minutes of
collaboration meetings, records of group leaders for statistical analysis, and
protocols and samples of data collection forms.

F. Computer-Mediated Collaborations

In this third and last phase of
the long-term study, the AIP determined that it should deliberately examine
a new category of collaborations that might well become more dominant in future
collaborative research. The principal characteristic our three case studies
in this category have in common is the central role of computer science and
technology--hence the name for this group, Computer-Mediated Collaborations.
Our sample of NSF-funded collaborations included a Science and Technology Center
(STC), a collaboration in a program devoted to using computation for theoretical
problems, and another collaboration in a category referred to as testbeds for
a National Collaboratory which focuses on access to remote instrumentation and
improved communications of researchers. We sought to learn of the relative health
of these new kinds of projects. From our site visits to NSF and DOE and the
meeting of our Working Group, we were convinced that they would continue and
thrive over the near future.

Another purpose of studying these
collaborations was to obtain a clearer picture of the ways, if any, the focus
on computer science and computer techniques would affect a collaboration's organizational
structure and the records the collaboration generated, as well as which records
should be preserved. We found that the impact on organization structure and
on records creation is not apparent in the case of the NSF STC and the collaboration
using computation for theoretical problems in our sample. But the impact on
our testbed for a national collaboratory project was a different matter. There
are typically two purposes for collaboratories: to operate scientific instruments
by remote control and to provide researchers a venue for discussion and debate.
We could not see in our case study that the introduction of remote control of
instruments had a distinctive impact on organizational structure and related
records creation. But the electronic venues for discussion and debate generated
a plethora of records--far more than can be saved, even for significant projects.
At least until the design of these discussion chatrooms is better understood,
the records generated also require analysis by social scientists; this in itself
has an impact on the collaboration's organizational structure and management
as well as the records created.

It seems inappropriate to specify
records to document this category of our AIP Study. We can generalize that funding
agencies should preserve grant and cooperative agreement award files as core
records. We can also recommend that data generated by chatrooms should only
be saved for significant collaborations and that, even in these cases, a selection
of the data be made based on a key aspect of the research program.

The sociological study of Phase
III projects has focused on two questions that confront scholars of multi-institutional
collaborations:

(1) What types of collaborations
are there?

(2) How, if at all, are these types
related to important outcomes?

Significant variation among collaborations
is recognized. Its mere demonstration is no longer as important as the question
of whether there are identifiable patterns of social organization. Our goal
is to characterize multiple types in a systematic fashion--that is, can a robust
classification scheme be developed? Accordingly, the first problem is to determine
the general dimensions that characterize multi-institutional collaborations
in science, to operationalize these dimensions and examine the extent to which
they allow us to distinguish empirical clusters to form a classification. But
such a classification scheme is of limited value in the abstract. It becomes
significant insofar as the types defined are related to important sociological
outcomes. The second problem is to identify and develop indicators of these
outcomes and to determine whether they bear any relationship to the types identified
in the classification.

The role of trust in interorganizational
relations has been well documented. It is not an exaggeration to claim that
trust is required for all systems of knowledge production and especially when
scientific institutions and individual researchers have to coordinate their
efforts toward a common goal, as is typically the case for multi-institutional
collaborations.

Scientists engaged in multi-institutional
collaborations are often exposed to high levels of stress for a variety
of reasons: complex technological demands, unclear or changing social arrangements,
the need to coordinate geographically dispersed groups, the clash of interests,
ambiguity in the distribution of authority, and the pressure to perform according
to time constraints and the expectations of funding agencies. The factor of
time constraints is especially important, since time is a critical resource
in working together. In many cases the degree of stress induced by schedules
and deadlines is higher than in typical academic settings. This is mainly due
to pressure from funding agencies and participating institutions to perform
within tight budgets as well as under time constraints.

Documentary practice--the
generation and use of records--is essential for the work organization of multi-institutional
collaborations. Beyond that, the role of historical accounts has long been recognized--as
has the fact that the reconstruction of such accounts depends heavily on the
preservation of written documents. The ultimate intent of the AIP Study is to
assist archivists and others in identifying and locating the kinds of records
most valuable in documenting the organizational structures and functions of
multi-institutional collaborations. Data on two variables that measure documentary
practices of collaborations--dispersion of core records and quality of records--were
analyzed to help meet this archival goal. Project historians and archivists
identified the core records (i.e., the small set of records that should be saved
for all collaborations of a given scientific discipline); they also identified
the likely locations of the core records for each of the collaborations selected
for study. Project sociologists included these data in their database. We posit
that the extent to which core records are dispersed is an indicator of project
decentralization as well as of the degree of difficulty involved in reconstructing
accounts of the collaboration (Warnow-Blewett 1997).

All social formations that involve
ongoing use of resources, even those that involve only prestige, have the potential
for conflict. Multi-institutional collaborations are not devoid of
disagreements, contentions, and conflict. From a sociological point of view,
conflicts are especially interesting because they provide insight into the dynamics
of social cohesion in the collaboration, as well as what this might be due to.

Of course, "performance" is the
most valued outcome of science, the criterion by which projects are evaluated.
Multi-institutional collaborations may be defined as successful or unsuccessful
in terms of many dimensions: the extent to which they accomplish objectives,
are completed on time or within budget, produce results that are used by others
within and outside the field, and so forth. Yet there is often a general sense
in which projects (especially those that require substantial commitments of
resources and personnel) are evaluated positively or negatively by the scientists
who work on the collaborations. It is in this sense that we speak of the "success"
of a collaboration.

B. Structural Dimensions of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations

The AIP Study of high-energy physics
(Phase I) and space science and geophysics (Phase II) enabled us to identify
primary dimensions that were important in multi-institutional collaborations.
All of the interviews from the first phases had been previously assessed and
categorized in terms of major topics or themes. These major themes, along with
other factors identified in the historical analysis, led to the recognition
of general and specific properties of collaborations. We identified seven major
structural dimensions of multi-institutional collaborations: project formation,
magnitude, interdependence, communication, bureaucracy, participation, and technological
practice. These dimensions and some of their constituents may be summarized
briefly:

(1) Project Formation and Composition.
Collaborations have a variety of origins. Some encompass academic, governmental,
and private sectors. In others one sector is dominant, both in origin and constitution.
The role of pre-existing relationships among researchers varies, as well as
supervision and funding agency involvement.

(2) Magnitude. Some collaborations
are larger than others, in terms of the number of organizations, teams, individual
participants, graduate students, and subcontracts. Costs for personnel and instruments
differ a great deal, as does the length of the project.

(3) Interdependence. Data-sharing,
the analysis of joint data, and the autonomy of organizational teams with respect
to instrumentation distinguish collaborations in terms of the interdependence
of their constituent social formations.

(4) Communication. Relations
with the public are sometimes managed by a designated public relations officer.
Results may or may not be popularized and restrictions may be placed on publications.
Internal to the project itself, a communications center is sometimes utilized,
and projects may depend more or less on formal communication modes.

(5) Bureaucracy. The degree
of bureaucracy is a fundamental aspect of organizational structure and has been
conceptualized in a wide variety of ways. Phases I and II showed that collaborations
could be distinguished according to the presence of a lead center, designated
scientific and administrative leaders, and the division of authority between
them. In the current Phase III, our examination also included the presence of
written contracts and coordination of schedules as well as the presence of outside
formal evaluation in assessing the degree of formalization. We also found that
projects vary in terms of levels of authority, style of decision-making, and
presence of external advisory committees.

(6) Participation. Graduate
students are involved more in some collaborations than others. Principal scientists
may be more or less interested in and devoted to a project. International involvement
is sometimes crucial for a project, but in others it is not present at all.

(7) Technological practice.
Multi-institutional collaborations vary in the ways they acquire and use instrumentation.
Characteristics of acquisition and use allow us to distinguish a broad array
of factors that may be designated the "technological practice" of the collaboration.
Some collaborations design and build their own equipment, some advance the state-of-the-art
in instrumentation, and some modify their instruments during the course of the
project. Technological practice is not merely instrumentation but includes the
management of research topics and the checking of results.

C. Results

1. Findings from Bivariate Analysis
The most important results from cross tabular analysis may be summarized in
three points:

First, surprisingly, in the Phase
III sample, field of research was not related to many variables at the bivariate
level, and--more importantly--it was not significantly associated with the organizational
indicators. Therefore, certain organizational features of collaborations persist
regardless of the broad specialty area. Nevertheless, there were several relationships
where field mattered. For example, in our sample of collaborations (all primarily
American), field affects instigating sector. Ground-based astronomy and medical
physics are more likely than heavy-ion physics and especially materials science
to have been instigated only by the university sector. Sectoral composition
of institutional members reflects the same pattern. Field of research is also
significantly related to scrutiny from outside authorities. Medical physics
was the only field in which most collaborations received scrutiny from Congressional
committees or White House offices--two thirds of these projects were scrutinized.
This seems natural, since there is a great social and political interest in
research on medical diagnostics and treatment. The only other field to receive
some attention from the same authorities was ground-based astronomy.

Second, the magnitude of multi-institutional
collaborations was, as anticipated, positively related at the bivariate level
to their formal organization and management. Thus, size (number of participants)
and the existence of external advisory committees are positively associated.
Large (83.3%) and medium (75%) collaborations are more likely to have such a
committee than small collaborations (11.1%). This finding is within reasonable
expectations, since normally we would expect greater oversight for bigger projects,
where more people are involved. Size of the project is also significantly related
to the presence of an administrative leader. The direction of the association
is in accordance with previous findings in the organizational literature--that
larger organizations tend to be more centralized and formalized. For our sample,
large (100%) and medium (87.5%) collaborations are more likely to have a designated
administrative leader than small collaborations (33.3%). Furthermore, larger
collaborations are more prone to have a division between intellectual and administrative
authority. Collaborations with a large number of participants have division
of authority in 83.3% of the cases, those with a medium number of participants
in 75%, and those with a small number of participants in 22.2%. Finally, duration
is usually related to greater formalization. For example, we found a significant
covariation between levels of authority and length (from the formulation of
the original idea to funding). Collaborative projects with a shorter period
prior to funding are likely to have fewer levels of authority than longer projects.

Third, a number of structural characteristics
of multi-institutional scientific collaborations were related to two important
outcomes of these collaborations--conflict (disagreements) and trust. The general
conclusion is that greater magnitude and greater formalization lead to more
problems and less trust. For example, style of decision-making is significantly
related to problematic results due to time pressure (although, strictly speaking,
this is not necessarily a causal relationship). This relationship is in the
predicted direction--that more "hierarchical" collaborations would tend more
often to have problematic results caused by time pressure. Next, length from
funding to first publication of results from the collaboration is significantly
related to conflict between teams. Longer collaborations (up to first publication)
tend to have more disagreements between teams. Division of authority significantly
contributed to conflict between researchers and the project management. Multi-institutional
collaborations in which there was a division between intellectual and administrative
authority had conflict between scientists and the project management in 38.5%
of the cases vs. none of the projects where there was no such division.

Overall, the degree of trust was
fairly high. However, there was some covariation with the organization and magnitude
variables. Style of decision-making is associated with trust. In all collaborative
projects with a consensual style of decision-making, the degree of trust towards
other researchers was high; by contrast, trust was high in only one-third of
collaborations with a hierarchical manner of decision-making. Size and trust
towards the project management are negatively related. In over three-quarters
of the small collaborations, and all medium projects, the degree of trust towards
the management was high, as compared to only one-third of the large collaborations.
Finally, hierarchy (levels of authority) is also negatively associated with
trust.

Collaborations with fewer levels
of authority than a typical academic science department are characterized by
high degree of trust towards project management in 93% of the cases, in contrast
to only 44% of multi-institutional collaborations with the same hierarchical
complexity as a university department.

2. Technological Practice as
a Basis for Classifying Collaborations Our principal analytical question
is whether collaborations may be classified into types based on structural dimensions
that are related to important outcome variables. Cluster analysis provides a
useful tool for categorization, while analysis of variance is appropriate for
determining the relationship between types of collaboration and outcome dimensions.
Cluster analysis was performed for each of the seven major structural dimensions
described above. Each analysis produced groups of collaborations based on different
distinguishing criteria. The solutions utilized ranged from two factors for
interdependence to five factors for magnitude and participation.

Which clustering solution is best?
Clearly, different solutions may be preferred for different purposes. In light
of the fact that the present state of our knowledge of collaborations in science
does not allow us to make a decision based on prior research or on theoretical
grounds, we concluded that this issue should be resolved empirically.

The results showed that the clustering
based on technological practice is superior to other structural dimensions in
providing a classification that relates to outcomes. Our five outcome indicators
are success, trust, conflict, dispersion of core records, and stress. Only
the clustering based on technological practice is related to all of these outcomes.
Clusterings by magnitude and bureaucratic organization are related to reported
conflict (as the bivariate analysis already suggested) and also to documentation,
while clusterings by project formation, participation, interdependence, and
communication are unrelated to any outcome. We conclude that technological
practice is the most promising dimension for framing a classification of multi-institutional
collaborations.

(1) Managerial Type. The
most distinctive feature of the seven multi-institutional collaborations that
constitute the first type was the combination of management of data analysis
and planned development of instrumentation. We propose to designate these collaborations
as managerial--not to imply high levels of bureaucracy, but because there are
relatively high levels of control over instrumentation and data analysis.

The managerial group is the only
type in which most of the collaborations actively managed the topics to be analyzed
by individual members. Topical management does not imply imposition of research
themes on the participants, but rather the coordination of data analysis by
the collaboration team. For example, the observation of the Galactic Center
Sagittarius A at 3 mm frequencies had to be done at four observatories according
to a maser time standard.

The technological configuration
associated with type one, centered on management of data analysis, is associated
with lower levels of trust between project teams and relatively high levels
of stress and disagreements. These collaborations are also perceived as less
successful than all but the routine type (type four). Apparently, the relatively
standardized, planned development of instruments is not associated with lack
of conflict. Rather, attempts to maintain high levels of control may themselves
generate difficulties. Managerial multi-institutional collaborations are in
this respect the opposite of those in type two (decentralized), which have the
lowest levels of management of data analysis and the highest perceived success.

(2) Decentralized Type. The
most significant difference in our cluster analysis is the one that sets type
two apart from the other types. In none of these projects was there central
management of data analysis. Topics for analysis were controlled by independent
teams. For this reason we term type two decentralized. The characteristics of
decentralized collaborations are otherwise in some respects quite similar to
those of the managerial type in terms of a focus on technological instrumentation
and cross-checking of results among teams.

One difference between managerial
and decentralized collaborations is reflected in their documentary practices.
The dispersion of core records is much greater in the latter. This state of
affairs is a result of their characteristic of team control. Decentralized collaborations
tend not to exert control over data analysis, while managerial collaborations
exercise a great deal. Management of data analysis and lack of changes in the
instrumentation seems to have contributed to the greater centralization of records
in the managerial type. It is worth emphasizing here that decentralized collaborations
view themselves as extremely successful, perhaps because they are patterned
on the traditional, academic organization of science.

(3) Noninstrumental Type.
The third type can be designated as noninstrumental because its primary distinction
is that these collaborations neither design nor build their own equipment, nor
do they subcontract the construction of such equipment. All of them performed
sophisticated experiments or observations by making use of already existing
facilities. Thus, for example, the project on Crystal Structure brought together
materials scientists, solid state chemists, and solid state physicists from
Dupont, BNL, and SUNY-Stony Brook. These researchers sought to determine the
structure of certain materials, using an already existing beamline at the National
Synchrotron Light Source in Brookhaven.

(4) Routine Type. What distinguishes
collaborations that belong to the last type is relatively low innovation and
high coordination of results. Typically, high coordination of results is the
product of the division of labor within a collaboration--separate research teams
tackling specific topics that have to be integrated. Like the noninstrumental
type, these projects had relatively large overlaps in the topics addressed.
But unlike the noninstrumental type, teams in routine collaborations
never checked the accuracy of each other's results. For example, there were
three separate teams in the Advanced Light Source Beamline Collaboration, each
responsible for an end station. Checking and coordination occurred within the
individual research teams, but not between them. Another distinctive feature
of these routine projects was that, while several designed and built instruments,
they were less likely than other types to push the state-of-the-art in their
respective scientific fields and there was not much time pressure.

The nature of the relationships
between the technological practices of collaboration and the dependent measures
is complex, and the emerging patterns are not always intuitive. Nevertheless,
at least one fairly clear-cut contrast in terms of collaboration outcomes appears
to be the division between managerial and routine projects. Where managerial
and routine projects differ is in such interpersonal relations as trust, stress,
and conflict. Managerial collaborations have a lower degree of trust toward
other researchers, higher levels of reported stress, and more serious disagreements
between teams, while informants from routine collaborations report higher trust
toward their colleagues, lower degree of stress due to time pressure, and relatively
few disagreements.

Neither of these types define themselves
as particularly successful compared to the other types. The most successful
projects belong to the decentralized type, which is also characterized by comparatively
high degree of stress and between-team conflicts. Thus, it looks like success
in multi-institutional collaborations comes at a price. Although management
of data analysis is associated with higher conflict, our data do not allow us
to determine whether these management practices generated the conflicts, or
were implemented to reduce them. A closer examination shows that management
of data analysis in and of itself may or may not be positively associated with
conflict and stress within the collaboration. Thus, the collaborations that
comprise the decentralized type are not highly managed, yet exhibit higher levels
of stress and conflict than routine collaborative projects. It seems that this
is due to the combination of lack of management of topics to be analyzed and
frequent modification to the instrumentation. Managerial collaborations, which
also experienced high degrees of conflict and stress induced by deadlines, did
not have any changes in instrumentation, but like decentralized projects, engaged
in results checking. Thus, regular checking of the accuracy of each other's
results could be the common denominator of high levels of conflict and stress.

The following recommendations pertain
to actions needed to document collaborative research in physics and allied sciences,
particularly in those fields studied by the AIP Study of Multi-Institutional
Collaborations during its third and final phase, namely: ground-based astronomy
(divided into observatory builders and observatory users), materials science,
heavy-ion and nuclear physics, and medical physics and an area we named computer-mediated
collaborations.(1) The recommendations are justified
in more detail in the second volume of this report. Many, if not most, of the
documents referred to are currently on paper, but our recommendations also apply
to information in electronic format.

The AIP Center has encountered a
wide range of complexities facing the documentation of experiments in modern
physics and allied fields. On the most basic level, good records-keeping may
be acknowledged by all as necessary while the experimental process is alive,
but when the project is over, records can easily be neglected, forgotten, or
destroyed. As a result, the most important recommendation (Recommendation #10.c.)
urges a new approach to securing the documentation for future collaboration
projects. We suggest that, once a project has been approved by a research laboratory
(observatory, NSF center, etc.), the collaboration be required to designate
a member to be responsible for its collaboration-wide records. In addition--where
historical significance warrants--individuals should be named to be responsible
for group- (or team-) level documentation of innovative components or techniques.
This information should be incorporated into any contractual agreement with
the collaboration. Use of this simple mechanism would assist archivists by assuring
that records will be available for appraisal and by providing information on
their location.(2)

Multi-institutional collaborations
are virtually all funded by Federal science agencies and much of the research
and development is carried out at agency facilities. Most of our recommendations
are addressed to these agencies, as well as the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), because successful documentation relies heavily on the
effectiveness of their records management programs.

The recommendations are grouped
in the following order:

Recommendations--Policies and
Procedures

1. General

2. National Archives

3. Federal Science Agencies

4. Specific Federal Agencies

5. Other Institutional Settings

Recommendations--What and How
to Save:

1. Core Records by Scientific Discipline

2. Significant Collaborations

RECOMMENDATIONS--POLICY AND PROCEDURES

CATEGORY ONE--GENERAL

General Recommendation

Recommendation #1:
Professional files of key scientific faculty/staff members should be permanently
preserved by their institutional archives.

Explanation:

Virtually all of our recommendations
are focused on securing records of collaborations; accordingly, we must make
clear at the outset the importance of preserving papers of individual scientists.

For some decades now, it has been
traditional--especially in English-speaking countries--for professional files
of academic scientists to be permanently preserved in their institutional archives.
Those papers most frequently sought are of individuals who have made major contributions
to science or science policy on a national or international level or to their
university.

There are two principal targets
for this recommendation. First, university archives in all countries should
have policies to permanently secure files documenting the professional careers
of their distinguished scientists. Second, similar policies are sorely lacking
at virtually all research laboratories and other nonacademic institutions; they
should be initiated and supported by directors of laboratories, whether they
be in the corporate or government sector.

CATEGORY TWO--NATIONAL ARCHIVES

National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA)

Recommendation #2:
NARA should receive increased input from subject matter experts so that it can
make more informed decisions on records appraisal; NARA should work with agencies
to monitor and promote agency records management practices to insure that legal
regulatory responsibilities are met, including the identification and maintenance
of records of permanent value; NARA should identify and promote best practices
for records management programs that agencies should utilize, including the
development of R&D records criteria. The R&D records schedule of the
Department of Energy (DOE) could serve as a model for other scientific agencies;
and, NARA should consider, on a case by case basis, accessioning non-Federal
records essential to documenting Federal support of science.

Explanation:

2.a. NARA should receive
increased input from subject matter experts so that it can make more informed
decisions on records appraisal.

Although the National Archives has
responsibility for the final appraisal of Federal records, we are heartened
that it has become increasingly aware of the importance of obtaining input from
subject matter experts when appraising records of science and technology. Our
particular concern is for the policy and planning records as well as the R&D
records themselves. In these cases, it is urgent that the appraisal process
be initiated with those who best understand the value of the documentation--the
onsite records-creating scientists. Specifically, NARA should seek out subject
matter specialists for the review of R&D records schedules of scientific
agencies; it should also encourage records officers at science agencies to include
subject matter specialists in the assessment of the importance of particular
research projects; other opportunities for including subject matter specialists
should be pursued.

2.b. NARA should work with
agencies to monitor and promote agency records management practices to insure
that legal regulatory responsibilities are met, including the identification
and maintenance of records of permanent value.

NARA holds to its traditional position
of discouraging the placement of professional archivists at external agencies.
In its experience, the placement of an agency archivist equates directly to
the assembly of an institutional archives rather than conformance to the legal
requirement to transfer Federal records to the National Archives. For this reason,
when these recommendations discuss Federal records we refer to "records advocates"
(i.e., someone who can argue on behalf of the historical value of records) rather
than "archivists."

Accountability should be the cornerstone
of a records management program. While we propose some ways to improve existing
agency records schedules (see, e.g., our Recommendation #2.c., below), the most
serious problems we see are the failures to implement records programs by the
agencies themselves. All too often, those responsible for records programs are
ill-informed about their own institution and its science and technology, passive
about gathering records, and passive about suggesting to NARA the additions
or adjustments to their records schedules needed to protect valuable records
series. Typically, scientists, administrators, and other staff at the agencies
are uninformed about record-keeping programs.

Consequently, it is critical that
NARA work with agencies to monitor and promote agency records management practices.
They should see to it that the responsibility for records management has been
clearly assigned and defined and that staff are appropriately trained and experienced.

Records officers must be grounded
in records management principles and should be expected to serve as "records
advocates." Competencies for records advocates would include skills in dealing
with non-current records and archival, historical, or records management training
and experience. The National Archives has seen that records advocates have been
effective at such scientific settings as some of the accelerator laboratories
of the Department of Energy; these have offered the National Archives a far
better selection of records. The selection is better because a proactive program
is in place to review records at the place where they are created--consulting
those who created them--for the purpose of providing adequate documentation
of the entire facility. The records advocates we have worked with most closely
have been professional archivists, but trained historians or records managers
skilled in dealing with noncurrent records could work equally well as part of
a records management team. Records advocates should be expected to be knowledgeable
about the scientific institution and the research programs it carries out. They
should argue for the historical value of records in the context of agency records
schedules and help NARA understand the unique records creation process at each
of the science agencies. For all these reasons, we recommend that records advocates
(e.g., trained archivists, historians, or records managers skilled in noncurrent
records) should be made part of the records management programs--both at agency
headquarters and at the key facilities and laboratories.

2.c. NARA should identify
and promote best practices for records management programs that agencies should
utilize, including the development of R&D records criteria. The R&D
records schedule of the Department of Energy (DOE) could serve as a model for
other scientific agencies.

As part of a program to monitor
records management practices at Federal science agencies, NARA should consider
conducting a survey of science agencies about their basic records management
practices to determine the kinds of infrastructure now in place. This--along
with the our suggestions for implementation and for training and use of "records
advocates" in Recommendation #2.b., above--should help NARA identify Best Practices
for agencies records management programs. A set of Best Practices is sorely
needed and should be widely promulgated through the Wide World Web, other publication
vehicles, and discussions at sessions of professional meetings of records managers.

For science agencies, it is critical
that NARA develop Best Practices for developing criteria for the appraisal of
R&D records, including procedures for ranking the importance of specific
scientific research projects. Since NARA rescinded the part of its General Records
Schedule covering research and development records, it became necessary for
each science agency to schedule these records according to the unique practices
of their individual agencies. A number of Federal science agencies have already
done so. Among these, DOE, NASA, NIST, and NOAA have gone further to include
sets of criteria that help their agencies identify significant R&D records.
We believe all Federal science agencies should include such sets of criteria
in their records schedules. The schedules of the DOE, NIST, and NOAA could serve
as models.

The new DOE R&D Records Schedule,
approved in August 1998 by NARA, is by far the best schedule we have studied.
We are particularly impressed with its guidelines for procedures to rank scientific
research projects as "significant," "important," and "other" and to involve
the science records creators in this ranking. We also want to point out the
importance placed on the proper evaluation of scientific policy and planning
records in the DOE records schedules.

Our main purpose in this recommendation
is to ask NARA to include the development of criteria for the appraisal of R&D
records in its Best Practices. In addition, because National Archives appraisal
archivists play a key role in developing agency records schedules, we ask NARA
to urge them to encourage their assigned science agencies to have sets of criteria
that provide effective procedures for identifying significant research and development
records for permanent retention. This may require additional resources for the
National Archives' Life Cycle Management Division.

2.d. NARA should consider,
on a case by case basis, accessioning non-Federal records essential to documenting
Federal support of science.

Many important Federally funded
research organizations do not legally produce Federal records, yet some of the
records they produce provide valuable evidence of the government's support of
science. Accordingly, we ask NARA to consider--on a case by case basis--serving
as a repository of last resort for selected records of organizations not formally
affiliated with the Federal government that have no appropriate repository for
their records. Prime examples are contractor institutions that oversee FFRDCs
(Federally Funded Research and Development Centers) and free-standing research
institutions.

See also Recommendation #6.b. to
academic archives and #8 to NSF National Observatories.

CATEGORY THREE--FEDERAL SCIENCE
AGENCIES

Federal Science Agencies

Recommendation #3:
Federal science agencies should employ records advocates as part of their records
management staff; Federal science agencies' records management programs should
increase educational programs within the agency in order to stress the importance
and benefits of records management and the criteria for saving scientific records;
Federal funding agencies should save records documenting interagency funding
of collaborative research projects; Federal agencies whose research centers/laboratories
are operated under contract should permanently secure their headquarters' records
relating to the contractor organizations; Federal agencies should permanently
secure proposals and other documentation related to major research facilities
at their centers/laboratories and other sites; and, Federal funding agencies
should save controversial--albeit unsuccessful--collaborative research proposals
in addition to successful ones.

Explanation:

3.a. Federal science agencies
should employ records advocates as part of their records management staff.

Each science agency should examine
the effectiveness of its existing records management program and seriously consider
the benefits of adding records advocates--e.g., trained archivists, historians,
or records managers skilled in noncurrent records--to its staff, both at headquarters
and at major laboratories, flight centers, etc. that carry out national scientific
programs. Such advocates should be expected to work proactively with scientists
and administrators to become knowledgeable about their organization and the
science and technology it is dedicated to.

See also Recommendation #2.b. for
additional arguments.

3.b. Federal science agencies'
records management programs should increase educational programs within the
agency in order to stress the importance and benefits of records management
and the criteria for saving scientific records.

During our interviews with agency
scientists and administrators, it became clear that many individuals creating
important science policy records or scientific research records were unaware
of the record-keeping program of their agency. This was the case in varying
degrees at each of the agencies involved in our selected projects throughout
our long-term study: DOD, DOE, NASA, NIH, NOAA, NSF, and USGS. Education programs
to stress the importance of working with the scientists who create the records
and of following records retention policies in order to document their projects
would increase the survival of significant records. Agency records management
staff should take advantage of workshops offered by the National Archives. They
should, in turn, be expected to offer workshops for their agency employees,
both at headquarters and in the field. One very effective means is to hold periodic
workshops for secretaries and other files administrators (including those responsible
for maintaining central files) so that they understand agency records schedules
and are knowledgeable about identifying which records should be destroyed, which
saved, and how and why.

Individual Federal agencies are
usually the sole funder of collaborative research projects. In the instances
where their funding responsibilities are shared with other agencies, the agency
that takes the lead role should preserve on a permanent basis its records of
interagency meetings, correspondence, agreements, and so forth.

3.d. Federal agencies whose
research centers/laboratories are operated under contract should permanently
secure their headquarters' records relating to the contractor organizations.

In some important instances Federal
agencies (notably DOE and NSF) do not operate their research centers/sites directly
but rather through contracting organizations. Some contractors are universities,
corporations, or other longstanding institutions; other contractors are set
up for the very purpose of operating FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development
Centers). Examples of the latter category are AUI (Associated Universities,
Inc.), AURA (Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.), and
URA (University Research Association, Inc.). The role exercised by these contractor
organizations over the research directions and policies of their centers/laboratories
is considerable and, therefore, the importance of documenting their activities
is clear. Records at the relevant agency headquarters would include correspondence
between the agency and contractor, minutes of contractor board meetings, annual
fiscal and progress reports, and copies of committee reports--with names like
Users Committee and Visiting Committee--of the centers/laboratories under contract.

See also Recommendation #5 to NSF
and #8 to NSF National Observatories.

3.e. Federal agencies should
permanently secure proposals and other documentation related to major research
facilities at their centers/laboratories and other sites.

When laboratories request support
for the new research facilities (such as accelerators, particle "factories,"
telescopes, reactors, and supercomputers) and for other major instrumentation,
Federal agencies should permanently secure the proposals--whether accepted and
rejected-- along with relevant correspondence. Files for successful facility
proposals should also include financial and narrative progress reports, final
reports, records of agency site visits, correspondence with site officials,
and any other materials that provide valuable documentation.

N.B.: This Recommendation pertains
to proposals from centers/laboratories/observatories for building major research
facilities; Recommendation #3.f. pertains to proposals for experimental research
projects.

Federal funding agencies are currently
required to save records on successful research proposals (contracts, cooperative
agreements). We recommend that--for multi-institutional research collaborations--the
agencies also preserve the records for the (relatively few) unsuccessful proposals
that stimulate significant debates or controversies. The files typically would
include proposals, referee reports, minutes of panel meetings, and--in some
cases--records of agency site visits.

N.B.: This recommendation pertains
to proposals for collaborative research projects; Recommendation #3.e. pertains
to proposals from laboratories for building major research facilities.

CATEGORY FOUR--SPECIFIC AGENCIES

Department of Energy (DOE)

Recommendation #4:
DOE should be commended for its new R&D records schedule; it should make
certain the implementation of the schedule is fully supported.

Explanation:

The DOE and its Records Management
staff, as well as the NARA liaison archivist, deserve congratulations on the
development of its excellent, new schedule for R&D records--no modest task.
We now ask DOE to provide the fiscal and moral support needed for the implementation
of these important schedules.

We believe that the DOE's new R&D
Records schedules support these AIP Project Recommendations as well as our appraisal
guidelines (see Report No. 2, Section Three, Archival Findings and Appraisal
Guidelines). We ask that DOE Records Officers contact us regarding any discrepancies.

See also Recommendation #2.c. to
NARA and #3.b. to Federal Agencies, above.

National Science Foundation
(NSF)

Recommendation #5:
NSF should include archival arrangements in the requirements for cooperative
agreements to support its research facilities and its centers.

Explanation:

These NSF-supported research facilities
(e.g., National Observatories) and centers (both its Materials Research Science
and Engineering Centers [MRSECs] and its Science and Technology Centers [STCs])
do not create Federal records. Special arrangements should be made to permanently
secure the essential documentation of their research programs. Specifically,
NSF should fully fund the archival programs at its national facilities and recommend
archival care of core records of its centers.

NSF Facilities.
Because of their long-standing importance and because they lack affiliations
with established archival repositories, we are especially concerned about the
NSF National Observatories (e.g., National Radio Astronomical Observatory).
To our knowledge these observatories lack strong records management programs.
The NSF should encourage them through fiscal as well as moral support to initiate
archival programs to permanently secure at least their most important documentation.

NSF Centers. MRSECs
and STCs are relatively new and rapidly growing phenomena at academic settings.
NSF funds its centers for a period of years to function as multi-institutional
collaborations and foster research in particular areas of materials science
or science and technology. Although the centers are at academic settings, academic
archivists will need to be persuaded to consider the documentation of NSF centers
to be part of their responsibility. The fact that the NSF centers are impermanent
institutions presents another danger to the records.

NSF should stipulate appropriate
arrangements for records in its cooperative agreements / contracts. A very small
fraction of the amount awarded to the National Observatories would pay for the
proper organization of records permitting greater efficiencies of operations
as well as the archival maintenance or orderly transfer of records. Special
NSF funding may not be required to secure the small set of core archival records
of NSF centers.

See also Recommendations #6.b. to
Academic Archives and #8 to NSF National Observatories, below.

CATEGORY FIVE--OTHER INSTITUTIONAL
SETTINGS

Academic Institutions

Recommendation #6:
Professional files of collaboration principal investigators and other key academic
scientists should be retained by their home institutions according to their
individual careers; and, Academic archives should enlarge as necessary the scope
of collecting policies in order to accession non-Federal records of NSF centers.

Explanation:

6.a. Professional files
of collaboration principal investigators and other key academic scientists should
be retained by their home institutions according to their individual careers.

Theprofessional papers of PIs (principal
investigators) are a prime location for information concerning the development
of an experiment or an experiment team. A substantial fraction of the principal
investigators in the collaborations we studied are employed by academia. The
papers of those who have regularly led or participated in important collaborative
research are well worth saving. In other cases, collaboration-related records
kept by a faculty member should be accessioned, especially if the collaboration
was deemed significant.

N.B.: This is a rewording of Recommendation
#1, above. Our point here is to emphasize the essential role academic archives
play in documenting collaborative research by preserving the papers of individual
scientists who played leadership roles in the projects.

6.b. Academic archives should
enlarge, as necessary, the scope of collecting policies in order to accession
non-Federal records of NSF centers.

The NSF centers (both its Materials
Research Science and Engineering Centers and its Science and Technology Centers)
are funded for a period of years; although renewals are possible, they are not
permanent. The NSF centers are organized to function as multi-institutional
collaborations; most, if not all, make the final decisions on which researchers
at member institutions get funded. Like other NSF-funded organizations, the
centers do not produce Federal records.

The academic institutions within
which they operate should hold themselves responsible for accessioning core
records of the center. If such arrangements are not possible, the records should
be offered as a gift to the Archivist of the United States and the National
Archives and Records Administration.

The nonacademic laboratories/observatories
in our long-term study have included all major categories of research laboratories--primarily
those in the U.S., but also some major laboratories abroad. (During our Phase
III work, corporate laboratories and FFRDCs supported by DOE and NSF have been
institutional members of our selected collaborations.) With the exception of
DOE laboratories, virtually all nonacademic laboratories--however important
their contributions to science may be--lack programs to protect their valuable
records.

Our experience shows it is possible
to permanently preserve an adequate record of scientific research where laboratories
have records advocates (i.e. archivists, historians, or records managers trained
in noncurrent records), and impossible where laboratories lack them. Records
advocates are needed to work with scientists to identify and permanently secure
those records of interest to future scientist-administrators, historians, and
other users. From our experience it seems clear that the chief responsibility
for initiating these programs lies with the individual laboratory directors.
Once programs are in place, records advocates develop relationships of trust
and provide an array of invaluable services to laboratory staff and management.
The records they preserve are the best means to achieve the all-important institutional
memory.

As already stated, these NSF facilities
consist of some of the most important observatories in the country, if not the
world. There is no doubt that future historians and other scholars will need
to draw on their historically valuable records.

NSF National Observatories should
consider maintaining their collections of archival records on site. Where this
is not feasible, the essential records may be offered to a nearby university
or state historical society; they may also be offered to the National Archives
because they provide important evidence of Federal support of science.

See also Recommendation #2.d. to
NARA, #3.d. to Federal Agencies, and #5 to NSF.

RECOMMENDATIONS--WHAT AND HOW
TO SAVE

CATEGORY ONE--CORE RECORDS BY SCIENTIFIC
DISCIPLINE

Core Records by Scientific Discipline

Recommendation #9:
A core set of records should be saved at appropriate repositories to document
multi-institutional collaborations.

Explanation:

There is a short list of records
that, taken together, provide adequate documentation of most collaborative projects.
Prime examples of core records are proposal files at Federal funding agencies
(including referee and panel reports and annual and final progress reports).
Core records for collaborations in the disciplinary fields studied in Phase
III are listed in this report (Section One, Part III). For further information
on these records, see the Archival Analysis and Appraisal Guidelines, Section
Three of Report No. 2.

CATEGORY TWO--SIGNIFICANT COLLABORATIONS

Significant Collaborations

Recommendation #10:
Fuller documentation should be saved for significant collaborations; Scientists
and others must take special care to identify past collaborations that have
made significant contributions; and, Research laboratories and other centers
should set up a mechanism to permanently secure records of future significant
experiments.

Explanation:

10.a. FulleR documentation
should be saved for significant collaborations

A wider array of substantial documentation
should be preserved for highly important collaborations to meet the needs of
scientist/administrators as well as historians and other scholars. The early
identification of current experiments of outstanding significance should initiate
actions to permanently secure fuller documentation for subsequent appraisal.
For example, laboratory research directors should make sure that chief scientists
take steps to safeguard records of potential historical value. This documentation
would include those categories of records specified in the appraisal guidelines
prepared by the AIP Study and other records found to contain valuable evidence
of the collaboration's organizational structure and research process. Records
to be saved for significant collaborations in the disciplinary fields studied
in Phase III are listed in this report (Section One, Section III) and described
in detail in Report No. 2, Section Three: Archival Analysis and Appraisal Guidelines.

N.B.: We make note that, for the
largest and most controversial multi-institutional collaborations, significant
documentation will also be found at higher administrative levels, such as offices
of presidents and provosts of universities, top administrators at agencies and
laboratories, and other key policy boards. We do not address recommendations
to offices at such higher levels on the assumption that their records are already
secured.

10.b. Scientists and others
must take special care to identify past collaborations that have made significant
contributions.

Future scholars, as well as science
administrators and policy makers, will need considerably more documentation
in order to study in more detail those multi-institutional scientific collaborations
that can be considered most significant in their contributions to advances in
scientific knowledge, including theory and experimental techniques.

There exist general guidelines for
identifying significant research projects. The best we have found thus far are
in the 1998 DOE Research and Development Records Schedule.(3)
Other parameters for identifying significant projects can obviously be made
to meet the needs of particular research laboratories, say in the corporate
sector, or by disciplines outside those covered by DOE research. Our first concern
must be the identification of past collaborative research projects, since the
documentation becomes endangered as soon as the project has ended and scientists
turn their attention to other matters. The participation of all knowledgeable
parties is needed:

1. Individual scientists
could bring the contributions of a research project they consider to be significant
to the attention of their research director, institutional archivist, etc.

2. Academic departments
or research laboratories could set up an ad hoc history committee from
time to time to identify their most significant research projects and bring
them to the attention of their provost, archival program, etc.

3. Policy and planning bodies,
such as DOE's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, could compile lists of most
significant research collaborations and broadcast them to their disciplines.

4. History committees of
AIP Member Societies could either compile lists or survey their members
for contributions and then broadcast the lists to their members.

The AIP Center for History
of Physics will also contribute to the identification of recent significant
research collaborations by working proactively with Boards of the National Academy
of Sciences and other policy and planning bodies.

10.c. Research laboratories
and other centers should set up a mechanism to permanently secure records of
future significant experiments.

The scientists and research directors--at
laboratories/observatories and other research centers--are best informed to
identify those experiments/projects that are likely to be considered significant
by future judgements. We are aware that efforts to document events from earlier
decades will be frustrated by frailties of records-keeping practices. Therefore,
we urge the laboratories themselves to identify as early as possible experiments/projects
of potential significance. While doing so, the research directors should bear
in mind the recent emergence of subcontractors for major research and development
collaborations and identify experiments/ projects in which significant subcontracts
should be documented--either by the laboratory, the subcontractor, or a combination
of both.

Laboratories and other research
centers can easily reduce the complexity of locating the additional records
needed to document the more significant experiments by setting up a mechanism
to identify and permanently secure records during or prior to their creation.
Once a proposal for an experiment is approved, the research center should require
a collaboration to include in their next write-up a statement as to: (1) which
individual collaboration member should be responsible for collaboration-wide
records and (2) which, if any, records on the team level should be retained
on a long-term basis because of scientific significance.(4)
A collaboration's chief scientist knows at the outset when a particular component
of the instrument or technique is revolutionary or innovative; appropriate identification
and assignment of records responsibilities for these should be included. When
assigning responsibility for collaboration-wide records to an individual, the
chief scientist should select a collaboration member at a permanent institution;
in many cases, this will be an academic institution or the research center itself.
A collaboration's statement about records-keeping responsibilities should be
incorporated in its MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) or other contractual agreement
with the research center.

The purpose of this recommendation
is to secure the records that may be needed to document significant experiments.
Later, when an experiment has been identified as significant, archivists will
be in an excellent position to contact the individuals assigned responsibility
for the records and make arrangements to permanently preserve those of enduring
value.

The laboratories and research directors
should also consider employing technologies that would assist in the capture,
retention, and access to valuable evidence. For example, the research centers
could retain certain files, such as collaboration e-mail, Web sites, and other
relevant electronic records, on the their computer systems.

Recommendation #11:
Institutional archives should share information on their relevant holdings with
each other and with AIP/RLIN.

Explanation:

Knowledge of institutional records
and professional papers of individuals is essential to foster use by historians
and other scholars. For example, papers documenting a particular experiment
are likely to be physically located in various repositories; shared catalogs
will bring them together intellectually for the user. Archivists should include
sufficient facts--such as laboratory name and experiment/project number or title--to
identify the experiments documented in their collections when they prepare inventories,
scope and content notes (or any other descriptions), and indexes.

One means for archivists to broadcast
information on their holdings is to send descriptions of collections or records
series to the AIP where they will be added to the International Catalog of Sources
for History of Physics and Allied Sciences, maintained by the AIP Center for
History of Physics (http://www.aip.org/history/). In cases where the archives
itself does not report its holdings to the American database RLIN-AMC (the Research
Libraries Information Network-Archives and Manuscript Control) of the Research
Libraries Group, the AIP can provide this service.

THE ROLE OF THE AIP CENTER

The AIP Center can play a facilitating
role in a number of these recommendations. It can work with laboratories and
other research institutes by: (1) providing advice to those that decide to establish
or upgrade archival programs, (2) aiding in the process of identifying significant
experiments, and (3) assisting laboratory advisory committees in such areas
as identifying appropriate repositories for papers and records documenting significant
experiments. The AIP Center will continue its work with corporate, academic,
and other institutional archivists to preserve significant papers and records
and to provide advice on records appraisal. In addition to its International
Catalog of Sources, the Center offers, upon request, such cataloging tools as
topical indexing terms and authorized names of thousands of individuals and
institutions. Contact information is available on our Web site (http://www.aip.org/history/).

2. The recommendation
is well-suited to projects conducted at, or--in the case of NSF centers--approved
for funding at a central research site. Unfortunately, fields like VLBI observations
and medical physics lack a central site; in such cases, the most appropriate
person to recommend the identification of "records keepers" would be the program
officer at the funding agency.

3. See the DOE
Website (http://www-it.hr.doe.gov/)
for this schedule; of particular interest is the Introduction which includes
a review of the guidelines and an R&D evaluation checklist. See also Recommendation
#2.c. to the National Archives, above.